Suffering is Universal: Blood ties meant nothing to them
by Traitor of All Traitors
Summary: In one other lifetime, someone told Shinji that he wasn't the only one in pain. Lifetime after lifetime, he has been unable to escape his suffering. And now, in another lifetime that has stagnated, he meets someone that is also on the path to suffering because of people that saw them only as a resource instead of a person in need. He doesn't want them to follow him to the grave.
1. Suffering is Universal

Creation began on 02-21-20

Creation ended on 02-24-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Suffering is Universal: Blood ties meant nothing to them

A/N: Even at the end of the world, those in control will refuse to listen to one voice that asks for the most important of wants and needs. How cruel is that?

Shinji Ikari. While that name may as well have been an omen for most of existence, it only held a sickening weight on the crippled soul of the man that possessed it, and he no longer looked anything like the person he used to be. It may have been an eternity since he last returned to the former blue-now-red planet that was no longer Earth in his universe, fractured into many a great multiverse, still searching for the woman that wronged him with her agenda, her self-righteous beliefs and need to exploit him, but time had lost much of its sway on him. At least in the physical sense due to his premature aging had ceased after his face developed several wrinkles under the dark spots of his eyes; not even a year's worth of sleep could've mended his complete lack relaxation. What was time to one that didn't want it…but was forced to go on like the condemned Cain for, supposedly, murdering his brother, Abel?

Shinji often felt like he had lost bits of his own mind since he came to in the aftermath of Third Impact, which was as true as the reaction he demonstrated when he murdered Asuka for rejecting him…or rather, what he perceived as rejection; he wasn't sure of anything, anymore, beyond his need to find his mother…and kill her, therefore freeing himself of this wretched damnation she forced upon him, living these different lives that were never truly his own. There was no sense in these different, fractured existences where he was either worse than his present state or with people that he didn't know for real. Who lives a ten-day life of murder and bloodshed in order to murder their own father for abandoning them? Who lives with strangers that treat you as family without the blood ties? Not even the life where one had to sacrifice much of their own flesh and blood for a fake mother that might as well have been better than the one that left you!

None of these lives made any sense or brought any comfort to his tortured soul…and never could replace the pain in his heart or undo the past he was dealt.

"…_This world is only cruel…because of the people in this world that choose to be cruel," _he heard a little girl say to someone, which caught his attention as he stumbled into another world's shadow, seeing a little girl laying on the ground under a pool of blood. _"…And you people are just too cruel to be around… If he's no longer around, then I don't want to be around any of you. I'll go to where he is."_

Shinji suddenly felt like his body had made contact with a wall of stone and every inch of his insides had been reduced to a jigsaw puzzle or something else awful.

"Who are you?" He asked the girl on the ground, and she raised her head up to look at him.

She looked about three or four years old, with short, ebony hair partially soaked in blood, giving it a wet aspect, with pale-brown eyes, dressed in a blue nightie with blood smeared onto its right side, as the girl had been laying on her right side.

"Shado," she answered him, somewhat frightened by his face. "Shado Ikari."

Shinji recalled a distant memory of why her name sounded familiar; in one of his fractured lives, she had been his illegitimate daughter by a woman that had kidnapped and assaulted him. The young man that he had been in that life put up with many levels of suffering to keep her with him, swearing that he wouldn't echo to her what his father had done to him.

"What happened to you?" He asked her.

"The last thing I remember doing…is escaping from these people that lied to me about my daddy," she responded.

"They lied to you about your father?"

"His aunt and uncle, these awful people his father left him with, tried to get rid of me by setting their own house on fire with me in it, tied up so I couldn't get away. Daddy came and got me out, but he got hurt and sent to the hospital. I didn't understand what anyone was saying…and nobody was really telling me anything, except asking me why I was there. Then this man with orange glasses and a face so cold that he frightened me came by…and he wanted to take me with him. I tried to run and hide, but these other people at the hospital caught me and kept telling me I had to go with him, something I didn't want to do. The next thing I know, these grown-ups keep telling me things I don't understand, that make no sense to me. They keep using words I can barely make out, like 'bagels' and 'navels', telling me, _"You have to fight in place of your father"_, _"Grow up or die"_, or that they didn't have the time or 'adequacy' to waste on someone that wouldn't or couldn't 'tight'."

While her vocabulary and comprehension were small, Shinji understood what she was telling him. He understood because it wasn't all that different from his own past that led him straight to this unending Hell he was in. Somehow, her world's wretched version of his father had decided to replace her father, another version of himself that had gotten injured saving her life, to pilot the Evangelion against the Angels, something that was a violation of professional and moral ethics; you couldn't go and just force a young child that wasn't even five years old to operate some heartless abomination you perverted against inhuman monsters and expect her to understand what was at stake if you chose not to explain it in ways that were comprehensible to her young mind.

"They wanted you to fight monsters," he told her. "They couldn't do it themselves and they couldn't have your daddy do it, either, so they thought they could use you."

"And they did," Shado explained to him. "Only once, though. They just sent me out against this thing that was scary. I wanted to run away, to call out for my daddy. They kept yelling at me to 'tight', but I didn't know what to do."

Suddenly, their background shifted into a perception of motion picture film that showed Unit-01 going up against the Fourteenth Angel (Shinji could assume that in Shado's mind, this Angel was scary as is) in Tokyo-3. The Angel used its paper-thin arms to pierce the Eva in the torso, causing agonizing pain to the little girl.

"The next thing I knew…I woke up in the hospital," Shado told him, and they saw the Eva move on its own and defeat the Angel. "I asked for Daddy…but this lady with purple hair told me he'd be by later. I didn't realize it until I tried to leave…that Daddy was never coming back for me."

They saw her past self with a look of pain on her face when Misato told her that the Shinji the girl knew would be by later for her (even he was disgusted by lying to a little girl with such a straight face)…and then the girl running from these people in white…and from Gendo, whose only concern was whether or not the girl could pilot the Eva again.

"I run out onto this roof and climb onto the side of it," she continued, "and then that lady goes and calls me by that awful name Daddy didn't like anyone calling me by."

"_Fuyona, stop!" _Misato had gasped.

"_That's not my name!" _Shado told her. _"Don't call me that!"_

"_Shado, don't do what I think you're going to do."_

"_Why'd you lie to me?!"_

"_What are you talking…"_

"_You did lie! You said that Daddy was coming to get me, but that was days ago! I kept asking, and everyone kept telling me the same thing! You know what happened to him, don't you?! You do! And you won't tell me!"_

"_Shado…we don't have time for any of this. There are more of those monsters out there…and we need you to fight them."_

"_No! I don't want to do that again! I want my Daddy! Don't make me do that again!"_

Then they saw Gendo show up…and he said something so awful to the girl that it shattered her belief in there being good people like her father in what remained of this pain-filled world.

"_Only an infant would whine for their parents, little girl," _he spoke with such cruelty towards Shado. _"Grow up and face reality. Your…father…is not here to help you navigate the world."_

_That bastard, _Shinji thought. _He never has anything nice to say to anyone! He has no sympathy towards anyone that he hurts!_

Shado then looked over the ledge of the rooftop…and knew what she had to do to get away from these people that she wouldn't aid in a conflict that she knew nothing about.

"_No, don't do what you're thinking about doing!" _Misato warned the girl, trying to approach her.

"_You don't know what I'm thinking," _she told her, standing up on the ledge. _"Daddy was right about something he told me a while back, about there being people in the world that were either good or cruel…and how this world is only cruel…because of the people in it that choose to be cruel. And he was right about people like you. This world is only cruel…because people like you choose to be cruel. And if he's not here…then I don't want to be left alone in this cruel world with people like you in it. I'll go to where he is…where people like you can't follow."_

Shinji saw tears escaping the girl's eyes as she didn't need to contemplate her fate any further than she had already.

_I'm sorry, Daddy, _he heard the girl's final thoughts…and watched as Misato tried to stop her as she jumped off the ledge. _This world is just too cruel when you're gone. Will the next one be kind? Will you be there waiting for me? Will you forgive me for coming to be with you?_

Shinji watched as the girl hit the ground below, understanding the subtle feelings of pain he felt within his own body now; her impact with the pavement had caused multiple broken bones, ruptured organs and turned her skull into a broken can of pulp. There was no hint in her way of thinking that what she was doing was wrong, that ending her own life was a sin. All she wanted, all she asked for…was just to be with her daddy again, the only person she ever trusted in this world that treated them both with cruelty. He felt sympathy for her, reminded in some way of something he knew that Misato had told him in at least one other lifetime that wasn't his own: _"You're not the only one in pain, Shinji."_

_But what do you know about being in pain? _He questioned to himself since she was not there to answer for herself. _What did you know about anyone else's pain? You just watched from the safety of an underground bunker, barking orders…and in this life, you just lied to a little girl about her father…and then watched as she died to get away from people like you and Father. You don't know anything about other people's pain. You weren't forced to pilot something that robbed you of your life, piece by painful piece, ordered by soulless people that were more concerned with their own wants and needs over the wants and needs of other people, that chose to hide the truth from the ignorant minds of the world, or that… You simply didn't understand anything about other people's pain, no matter what you said back then._

"You look a little bit like him, you know," he heard the girl say to him, "but you're not him, though you both have suffered."

"You have suffered, too," he told her. "And your…daddy was right about the world being cruel because of the people in it choosing to be cruel. You were both dealt an unforgiving hand in life by those that chose to be awful towards you."

"The aunt and uncle wanted me gone just to hurt Daddy…and Daddy got hurt because he wanted to save me. I was happy that he cared about me, but I was sad that he was hurt."

"In the end, he made the choice to save your life, a choice that he, as an actual parent that was concerned for your happiness and well-being, would've made again without any hesitation, no matter what might happen to him."

"Then why, despite what happened to him, did these people hate us so much just for being around? Why did that man, his daddy, hate me so much when he didn't even know me? Why were they all being so cold and awful towards us when we didn't know what was going on?"

"Because they had personal goals they wanted to achieve, no matter how it affected everyone else around them."

"Even it meant hurting us both?"

"Especially if it meant hurting you both."

"They really were cruel people."

Shado, despite her young mind and sensitive mentality, felt anger more than she felt confusion towards the people that despised her father and she. Anger because the people she saw last had lied to her about her father's current state after he was hurt saving her from a house fire, anger because they didn't have any place to call home…and anger because they didn't have a future in a cruel world that didn't want them to be happy. She felt she had to ask this man that was just as hurt as she was by cruel people something she needed to know.

"Is this Hell, the way we're living right now?" She asked him.

"For me, it's always Hell," he told her. "For most others, it's purgatory, a limbo between Heaven and Hell."

"How do you get to Heaven?"

"Heaven doesn't exist for me, anymore. Heaven never existed for me like it did for others. Everywhere I go, every breath I take…is just another part of my personal Hell that I'm trying to escape to go to wherever it is where my soul can sleep for eternity…as it fades away into nothingness, never to be found again."

Shado bowed her head to him; she got the impression that he had been around for a very long time…and had lost more than he cared to admit he had to lose…and now had nothing left to lose…and only one thing to gain.

"Who was it that hurt you the most?" She asked him.

"My parents," he answered. "First my mother…and then my father. They abandoned me. They used me…and then they abandoned me, and left me with nothing…but pain and suffering. My father paid for his arrogance and cruelty…but my mother constantly runs from her retribution, which is long overdue. I find her, I make her pay for her role in my hurt…and I know I'll be free from it all. I'll be free to close my eyes for the final time, knowing that I'll never wake again."

"That sounds…like a good dream, to leave it all behind, to stop feeling pain from everything that hurts you."

"Whether or not Heaven or Hell exists for me on this road of vengeance, I don't really know…but when nobody you know comes back from an existence that was forced upon them…and see you only as an excuse to get away from…a life where you don't exist at all, where you can't suffer because of anything or anyone…because you're not there is a prize that you want so much that you don't want to play anyone else's game or live under their plans. Do you believe in God?"

"For a while, I did…but I wasn't sure what god to believe in. I don't blame any god for the hurt we've been put through, though. Gods don't hurt people. People hurt people. Unless the god you believed in hurt you."

"God didn't hurt me, Shado. You were right about the gods not hurting people. It was people that hurt me. It was people that hurt you and your daddy. Deities, demons, those are blameless because they don't walk into your life and turn it upside-down or pull it inside-out. I can't blame God for my suffering. I blame my mother for my suffering. I blame my father for my suffering. I blame the people that rejected me for my suffering. God didn't do this to me or you."

Shado then stood up and dusted her dress of the minute traces of dirt.

"How do you find the people that hurt you…if they keep running away from you?" She asked.

"In this vast multiverse, you can only run for so long before you realize that it's running out of places for you to hide in. I've been chasing after my mother for so long, I've forgotten how many worlds, how many lifetimes I've had to live against my will in order to find her. A thousand lifetimes? Over a million lifetimes? I've lost count…and lost much of my sense of clarity and humanity to make sense of it all. But she can't run forever."

"Then…I'll help you find her," she told him.

"What?"

"You still have a monster that won't let you rest until you stop it for yourself. The way Daddy told me in a story, the people that hurt you the most are the monsters you have to stop from hurting you further. If you stop them, they can't hurt you, anymore. Maybe if I help you find your monster, I'll find Daddy and move on, too, just like you want to."

"I couldn't ask you to do that, even to help me. I have plenty of others to do that, others that have suffered in one form or another."

"Nobody should have to let others suffer when they can offer to help them. And there's no going back to that life I had back there with those people, anyway. So…lead the way, please."

And she was right about that; neither one could go back to their previous lives, no matter what they did. There was no going back for Shinji because everyone was just gone beyond his reach…and Shado couldn't because that life only had one person that mattered to her that was no longer there. And they both felt anger in their hearts that didn't fade over time, but now Shinji felt something besides his own anger for the first time in a long time: He felt like he had to help save this little girl that was an innocent soul from being condemned to a fate far worse than the fate he had been dealt. It was too late to save himself, but he hoped that it wasn't too late to save her from following him to his fate.

-x-

"…I'm here to see Ikari, Shinji," Misato Katsuragi spoke to the receptionist at the hospital where the comatose boy was admitted following his severe burns.

"I'm afraid you're too late," she told her. "Ikari, Shinji passed away three hours ago from multi-organ failure."

"What?"

"Apparently, someone let his aunt in…and she told him that his daughter died while in his father's custody. He just lost the will to live without his little girl. It's such a terrible way to go, for both a parent and their child to up and die."

Misato found it to be awful to know that the boy that was originally supposed to pilot the Eva was dead…and how she was among those labeled cruel because they decided to use a little girl that was his daughter to save themselves from the Angel that appeared. She thought the idea of having the child pilot until her father recovered or until Rei had recovered and they had the Second Child and Unit-02 over from Germany was originally flawless, but then realized that they would have to use growth accelerants on her, something that would've hurt the girl. And then to watch her jump to her death before they could stop her…was clearly a sign that they were crossing too many ethical lines just to survive.

_"Cowards are always useless," _Commander Ikari informed her, referring to his granddaughter after she killed herself.

_Except she wasn't a coward, _she thought. _She was just scared of us…and had every right to be. We forced her to pilot the Eva…and lied to her about her father._

Now NERV was in a hole they had to dig themselves out of before the next Angel arrived.

"…Did you hear about that girl?" She heard some of the people gossiping about what happened. "I heard she killed herself to get away from her grandfather."

"The guy that murdered his own wife in an experiment and abandoned his son? How messed up is that? What about his son?"

"He died because his aunt and uncle tried to kill his daughter in a fire."

"Those Ikaris are just bad people."

"An unprepared father for an unwanted girl, and they both end up dying because of the ties of blood that hate them."

"It's a cruel world we live in."

Misato couldn't deny this. It was a cruel world they lived in…and it was only going to get crueler as time passed by.

"…_You're cruel," _she thought she heard a boy say to her.

People who are cruel…are just evil when they breathe

A/N: Not exactly a _Different from You _story, but it certainly drew in an alternate version of Shado Ikari that was victimized by people alongside her father…and drove her to make a choice between life and death in order to escape from manipulation. And now we see the primordial Shinji Ikari own up to how he feels that it's too late to save himself from some retribution caused by the unkindness he was dealt, but he feels that he needs to save her from a similar fate because she never asked to be someone else's pawn or scapegoat.


	2. Extinguished Torches

Creation began on 03-02-20

Creation ended on 03-03-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Extinguished Torches

A/N: When all that remain of the Ikari family are its worst members, does a name like that deserve to be remembered? When two lives are forced to end prematurely due to spite from the other members of the family, did they ever truly matter to anyone?

Shinji Ikari, the only son of Yui and Gendo Ikari, the father of Shado Ikari, pronounced dead due to suffering from severe burns and multi-organ failure…and yet no funeral was in the works for him by anyone from his family. Not his father, whom he hadn't been in contact with for ten years since his mother passed, not his aunt or uncle, anyone.

Shado Ikari, originally named Fuyona Ikari, the bastard daughter of Shinji Ikari and Hama Tendo, the granddaughter of Yui and Gendo Ikari, pronounced dead as a result of a suicide jump a few days after she was sent to be with her grandfather after her father was hospitalized for his burns received from saving his daughter from a house fire. The claim that the grandfather could look after her while her father recovered was proven to be just a falsehood due to the man not knowing how to take care of any child. And despite both father and daughter dying just a day apart from each other, no plan of a burial was in motion for the girl, either. Not even plans to cremate them.

Gendo, the estranged father and cold-hearted grandfather of the two, just made the order to acquisition the remains of both young children to use for NERV's genetics research, something that appalled most of the personnel for his choice instead of doing something to honor the fact that he just lost his son and granddaughter.

Smash! A loud noise came from within his office, getting the attention of Misato, Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko, the former two who wanted to question Gendo's decision.

They opened the door and entered to find Gendo had been slammed against the wall on the right side opposite of the windows by a…a woman dressed in a black and green, scaly, armor-like bodysuit, sporting red lines extending from the arms and legs to a spot of her torso, oversized gauntlets and thigh-high boots. Her face was rather angular and pale, with a pageboy hairstyle and an expression of contempt.

"I really didn't want to believe what they told me about what you did," they heard her say, and Fuyutsuki reeled back from the sight of her. "I was hoping there would be at least one version of you that was different…but I guess even one prayer of you to be a kind person is literally asking for too much from anyone that listens."

"Yui?" Fuyutsuki questioned, and she turned to face him. "Yui Ikari?"

"Yes…and no," she answered him. "My time here is brief, so I'll just tell you what I'm here to do. This man that failed them…can no longer be trusted to do the right thing and honor them, so I'm taking them away from this place for good."

"Call security," Gendo ordered them. "Stop her! She can't have their remains!"

He was somewhat bloody and from the looks of things, his left arm was broken; if he'd been beaten, this woman had apparently done a small number on him.

"You're here for remains of the Third Child and his illegitimate daughter?" Ritsuko questioned her. "I'm afraid they're property of NERV's genetics division."

"They were people once, just a young boy and a little girl…and deserve to be treated as such, regardless of what you say. They don't deserve to be poked and prodded and dissected like they're nothing more than lab rats. If this is how you truly treat your own, then you don't deserve them any more than he does."

"They were signed over to NERV for study. It's the law."

"I say to Hell with your laws. I'm taking their remains from here."

The woman, Yui Ikari, walked over to them, her hands extended into claws, threatening to harm them if they stood in her way.

Fuyutsuki simply stepped out of her way and realized what was going to happen. He had to suspect that, somewhere down the long, someone was going to be upset with Gendo's choice to put his child and grandchild to something worse than he had done already…and act in defense of what needed to happen.

"Now, hold on a minute," Ritsuko tried to stand up to her, but Yui grabbed her and threw her aside to the floor.

"I used to think what we were doing was a noble thing," she uttered as she walked out of the office, "that we were making a difference for everyone. But if we can't even be humane to our own, what right do we have to call ourselves human? What right do we have to live…when we condemn our own to suffer in ways that are unforgivable? We have none at all."

-x-

With the men in white coats down on the ground, nursing their cuts on their arms and legs, a young, pale-skinned man with the barest resemblance to Shinji Ikari looked down at the deceased girl that was his daughter, cleaned up and prepped for experimentation. He was dressed in traditional Japanese attire (a dark hakama) with a metal gauntlet covering his right hand, sporting two submachine guns and a shotgun scabbard on his back and a kama in his left hand.

"I can hear what remains of your soul crying out to your father," he spoke as he picked up a discarded sheet and clothed the girl with it. "You don't deserve this. Neither of you deserve this. We're supposed to honor our dead with humanity by burying them so that they can return to the bosom of the Earth, or cremate them to spread their ashes to the winds or into the water someplace far from where they died. But if that man that drove you to take your own life to be with your father cannot honor his family…then he doesn't deserve what he cast aside at all."

He picked up the girl's body and carried her outside the room.

Just next door, a larger man, with a prosthetic left arm under a blue shawl, carried out a larger body wrapped in a sheet. He, too, had a resemblance to the young man that had died.

"Taken before their time," he uttered to the pale one. "It's not fair."

"Death is never fair," the pale one uttered. "But Death didn't do this to them. People whose hearts rot with cruelty drove these two to the realm beyond mortality. They're the only ones to blame for this act of spite towards two souls that struggled to belong in a world that shunned them just for existing. Whatever fate awaits the ones that remain…is the fate they themselves chose to be dealt with."

-x-

"…They all said the same thing," a security guard told Gendo in the infirmary, "a woman in armor with two men and a little girl came and took the Third Child and his daughter's remains and then they disappeared from the base."

"Find them," he ordered the guard.

"We're looking, but there's no sign of them ever leaving the Geo-Front. Nobody's seen or heard of these four, two of whom say looked like the Third Child, except one was older and the other looked like he needed more sunlight."

"Why would anyone want their remains?" Ritsuko, who was also present, questioned.

"Why else?" Fuyutsuki uttered. "To bury them, to cremate them, or whatever they felt was necessary to do them justice and honor them."

Gendo was handed four pictures of the foul culprits and had to admit to himself that the two men did possess some resemblance to his son while the girl was someone he'd never seen before, but was clearly older than his granddaughter by at least two or three years. The woman, on the other hand, looked exactly like Yui, his wife, but was…not the one he knew.

"_You don't deserve your son or granddaughter,"_ she had told him when she appeared in his office. _"You abandoned your son, drove his daughter, your only grandchild, to kill herself when you told her that the only person to have ever loved her unconditionally was gone. If you care very little for your family, then you don't deserve to honor their memory. You have only disgraced their memory by condemning their remains to an inhuman series of cruelty."_

"Do we have their DNA?" He asked Ritsuko.

"All we managed to get before they were taken were hair and skin samples," she answered.

-x-

It was a rather grassy field with few trees and flowers, spring-like weather, nothing like the humid, summer weather that was associated with Japan, and remote, someplace where they could be left alone because nobody would ever come to disturb such a place. There stood two lone gravestones, made of marble instead of black stone or metal, etched with the names, DOBs and DODs of the people that were buried…and in front of them were the four people that had liberated them from that awful place, there to pay their respects, even though they didn't know them at all.

"Thank you for doing this, Death," Yui addressed the pale version of Shinji.

"There is no better way to show respect for the dead than to bury them into the Earth," he responded, "to return them to the world."

The little girl, no longer sporting a golden, scaly-armored bodysuit, now dressed in a blue yukata with a black sash wrapped around the waist, placed two bouquets of flowers in front of the graves as a peace offering to their souls.

"I pray that you two will find each other in the next life," she uttered to the graves.

What brought these four different people from different lifetimes, different worlds, completely different fates that defied an original fate that was as cold and twisted as the fate that nearly befell this father and his daughter were it not for the crueler fate that befell them that was their way out of the cold life they were forced to put up with…did not matter as much as this moment did to them. They each either had to escape predetermined events that weren't worth fighting against…or protect someone else from such predetermined events that weren't worth fighting against on their behalf. They and several others had to do what others never thought to do, but there would always be others, those who were less fortunate or completely deprived of such opportunities to change the course of their destiny…that would find a way to escape that was just as unlikely…even if it was frowned upon to take what some would call the easy way out. But there was nothing easy about dying or taking your own life to escape a living version of Hell…and there never would be.

Two lives, two insignificant souls in a labyrinth of the flesh, blood and bone…were just gone now. And nothing, nothing of human means or divinity…would undo the fate they were dealt to free them from their mortal suffering. Their torches extinguished before they could even burn brightly to illuminate the darkness and frighten away the monsters that lived among them. And there was nobody that could reignite their torches…or would be asked to carry them through the darkness that was just beyond the last breath.

"Death," the girl spoke to the pale Shinji, "can you see their souls beyond us all?"

The pale, young man looked up to the blue sky and answered, "I can see their souls."

"What has become of them?" The older Shinji with the prosthetic arm asked.

"They are separated by pain inflicted upon them by those of blood ties that were as cruel as criminals that care not for the harm they inflict upon the innocent. The son that became the father wonders where his little princess is in the great beyond that is eternity. And the girl… She's with someone similar to her father…but is full of a pain so deep that there may be no saving him like there is hope in saving the girl."

"Save the girl's soul, save his soul," Yui stated. "How do you save one's soul…and give up on trying to save another's when there's even just a small chance of doing so?"

"Whatever it takes to save them," the little girl spoke. "Whatever it takes to save them."

Even in the abyss of time…may their souls burn with renewal…

A/N: If anyone can guess which incarnations of which characters were used in this chapter, they will get praise for figuring it out. Just look at the previous stories that were completed or are still being worked on. Anyway, what did you think of this chapter? I didn't think that Gendo would be a stickler for any measure of humanity represented in the acts we commit to honor our dead; they who don't respect their fallen will themselves fall farther than they can imagine. Who these days would do what he did and do so with a cold heart?


End file.
